Everybody Needs the Light

I listened to Marco Visconti’s account of his contact with a Non-Human Intelligence this morning. You can listen to it HERE. Inspired by his account, I thought I would share a story from my own misadventures.

— .:. —

“I know how it feels ’cause I have slipped through
To the very depths of my soul…”
— Jones, Page, Plant, In the Light

In the late 1980s, my grandmother had moved into a trailer behind my parent’s house so they could look after her, leaving her house empty. The family asked me to move in, to look after the place, and I readily agreed. It was an old Colonial, its terraced porch long since removed. It was in dire need of renovation, but it suited my purposes just fine.

I had converted a second‑floor bedroom into a ritual chamber, of sorts — the very same room where, in 1974, I had discovered my great-grandmother’s copy of Manly Palmer Hall’s Unseen Forces. Now, more than a decade later, I was assuming the role of magician and dedicating a makeshift temple to unlocking the secrets of the universe in that place where the occult world was first introduced to me.

The “temple” had three doors, to the north, south, and west, with the north door leading outside, though as stated, the balcony was a distant memory. There was a single window facing east, tall but narrow, stretching nearly floor to ceiling, where dawn would spill across the cool, chipped linoleum floor. I had removed all the furniture and constructed an altar in the center of the room, facing the window. The four elemental weapons were laid out upon it: wand, dagger, cup, and pentacle; a hand-carved statue of a wizard my father had made for me stood in for Odin; and I had two framed photographs, one of Aleister Crowley and another of Leila Waddell there as well.

Within this temple I performed daily meditations and rituals on Wednesdays, the nights of Full and New Moons, and whatever “holy days” came along. I will admit that psychedelics were taken on a regular basis, rarely as indulgences, but as sacraments: psilocybin on occasion, due to scarcity, and LSD far more often.

I was reading voraciously at the time, regularly perusing Crowley, of course, but I remember being very invested in Donald Tyson’s New Magus and Gerald Schueler’s Advanced Guide to Enochian Magick and Enochian Physics, in those weeks preceding the “event”.

I was living in a state of deliberate permeability.

When my Knowledge and Conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel occurred, it did so without warning.

It was late evening and I had retired to my ritual space. Earlier in the evening, a friend had had a peculiar experience of bilocation, and that was on my mind as I sought to sink into a meditative state. As the night gave way to dawn, I was visited by a pure beam of transcendent light. I dare say that it did not illuminate the room so much as it inhabited the space. I felt it pass through me before I saw it, starting as pressure behind my eyes, and as a calming warmth between them, as my third eye was seemingly opening and shedding a tear.

There it was, a prescient light before me… and it spoke, but not with a voice, for there were no words, just a thunderous telepathic surge of emotion and comprehension on my part. I felt my whole body shiver with an ecstasy that words cannot give proper meaning to.

I was filled with hope, joy, and a fierce and radiant love, for lack of a better understanding, but beneath it, I could sense its message within every cell of my being. I was to remain curious and daring. I was to continue the work. But more than that, I felt a connecting tether to the land itself, and I felt the sanctity of it. I knew then, in my heart and soul, that this presence was bidding me to remain within the boundary of the old Miami Territory, the expanse of the Mississinewa, and I felt that river flowing through my veins. I felt this as a warning, that outside of this sacred space, there would be pain and suffering, but the land would look after me and those I cared about.

Then, I was left spent, in silence, laid out before my makeshift altar, renewed, recharged… and rewarded. The memory of that experience is ever-present, and I have never shared it in this detail until today.